One of my all time favorites.

best movie i've ever seen.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Among the few Kaurismaki films I have seen so far, this is the one I think the most accessible and I strongly recommend it. My impression of it is completely vivid as I have just watched it minutes ago from the box I was offered a year ago for my 30's: a great present for movie maniacs. Kaurismaki does not film Helsinki this time, but another capital:London, with the same kind of views, the same urban landscapes, the beauty and the strangeness, the same insisting and passionate obsession than Scorsese with his New York. You still can find the same taciturnity of characters (perfect Kenneth Colley as the killer: I was glad to recognize Admiral Piett from The Empire Strikes Back), the same type of slow narration, though this time, the story is far simpler to understand upon first visualization. It deals with life and its contradictions, the preciosity of it, changes of mind and regrets, how desire between two people can make you see things differently, make you want to live on ; love regardless of social discrimination, that is so beautiful and yet so ideal! Another great point in Kaurismaki's films consists in the appropriate inclusion of a more or less famous rock music: perfect Joe Strummer, RIP. A great moment of poetry in cinema and a perfect film fit for beginners in Kaurismaki.

The problem of Henri Boulanger is similar to that of Odysseus who told his friends to tighten him up at a pole of his ship before they drive through Scylla and Charybdis, and, to never obey him if he asks them to loose the ties, because otherwise he will be lost for either of the two monsters. In the case of Henry Boulanger it is so that this sober, never-drinking, never womanizing Kafkaesque office-worker suddenly looses his job, when the company wants to shrink. Boulanger, who never had tasted the sweet delirium of alcohol and the seductive odor of cigarettes, does not know a catalytic spirit of auxiliary constructions that would help him over the shock of having lost his job. So, he does what nobody else would do in his situation: he hires a contract killer. However, shortly after having paid the sum to kill himself, he enters a bar where they do not sell tea, so, for the first time, under the horizon of his life coming to a soon end, he drinks whiskey after whiskey, learns how good this is for him and smokes cigarette after cigarette, greedily trying to catch up what he had missed his whole life. There, in the bar, he meets Margaret, his first and therefore biggest love of his life. Clearly, having tasted the real fruits of life, he does not want to die anymore. But how can he make his killers clear that he want to withdraw from his contract? While Odysseus stays cuffed on his pole, Boulanger errs lost like Odysseus through London.

Aki Kaurismäki, like all true film auteurs, creates worlds. Not in the sci-fi fantasy sense — though, I am not excluding sci-fi, merely broadening the concept — but in the subjective sense. Like Jarmusch, Fassbinder and Lynch, you get a feeling while watching a Kaurismäki movie that you are watching something highly personal. And so it goes with his odd and amusing love story, I Hired a Contract Killer, about a man who wants to kill himself but reconsiders after falling in love.Roll your eyes and say you've seen that kind of movie before, but with Kaurismäki at the helm you get something genuinely touching, without forced pathos, incidental-music, or faux-inspirational endings. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the French nouvelle vague star of such movies as American Night and 400 blows, IHCK moves us from Kaurismäki's usual film location in Helsinki to London. Like the down-and-out squalor of Kaurismäki's working class neighborhoods in Helsinki, the London depicted here isn't the refined upper-class cosmopolis depicted in Woody Allen's latest movies, rather it's a drab, trash-strewn working class London full of thugs and hard-drinking wage slaves.Jean-Pierre is plays Frenchman named Henri, who was spent the las 15 years of his life working for the same boring English company. Because of financial difficulties, his job has become redundant, and "foreigners" are the first ones to get the ax. Distraught — for his rote day job was the only thing that kept him from self-reflection — Henri decides to kill himself. He attempts to hang himself, fails when the rope snaps; so he tries to gas himself, but a gas strike that day leaves him without gas. The next day he reads an article about hit men operating in the city, and decides to hire a hit-man to do the job.He finds a lowdown bar in the roughest part of London and ridiculously goes to the bar and orders a ginger ale, much to the derision of the roughnecks around him. He announces, in his strong French accent, that "where I come from, veee eeet people like you for breakfast". This seems to calm suspicions. He finally meets the underworld boss and hires a contract killer.He spends the next hours anticipating his imminent death by constantly looking over his shoulder and providing clues for the hit-man to find him. One such clue is a note on his front door, indicating that he has gone out for a pint in the bar across the street. The very night that the hit-man is about to finish his job, he meets Margaret, a young women selling roses, and — in typically quirky Kaurismäki fashion — immediately falls in love. After barely evading the hit-man that night, he decides to call off the job. So he goes back to the bar from where he hired him, and, rather hilariously, it has burned down.This is probably the most Hitchcockian Kaurismäki has ever gotten, but it's an amusing and suspenseful plot device. Henri and Margaret spend the rest of the movie one step ahead of the hit-man, moving from her small apartment to a hotel, and finally with Henri going on the lamb when he finds himself unfairly implicated in a neighborhood hold up. Much like the characters in Jarmush's Down by Law, Henri becomes an innocent man with just about everybody against him — and, like Jarmush, Kaurismäki manages to make all his characters endearing and subtly humorous. This great mashup of an absurd, Kafka-esquire world, nearly-Hitchcockian suspense, and gentle humor, make this a not just a gangster movie parody, or a run-of-the mill love story, but truly, a movie with heart.

Do you like classics? Do you have a thing for Hitchcock, or lets say, Jean Pierre Melville? Do you wanna see how does that translate into a more modern progressive movie? Well! here is what you do: You go straight to a club and you purchase 'I Hired a Contract Killer'! It sticks with you; the futility, the humor, and the suspense. This is a picture that no matter what, you gonna remember for ever. The futility is so rich, that itself becomes the core meaning to everything. And the situation gets so baffled that emptiness becomes a survival. The suspension is perfectly 'Hitchcokic'& the use of music is great. It is among the pictures that secures you; makes you sure that still cinema exists; A cinema that tells you a story, a breathtaking one - and damn, Kourismaki is a great story teller; a noble one. One of the few left from the true heritage of motion picture industry and art. Lay back, watch and enjoy. This is pure cinema. As you might have guessed, I fully recommend it!